Despite the efforts of the Office of Management and Budget and two federal CIOs over the past five years to cut the cost of government information systems, federal agencies are still wasting money on redundant or overlapping IT projects. That's the finding of a Government Accountability Office report to Congress published September 12.

In a spot-check of IT spending by the three federal departments with the largest IT budgets—the Defense Department, Department of Homeland Security, and Department of Health and Human Services—the GAO found that a total of $321.25 million was spent between 2008 and 2013 on projects that duplicated other efforts within those same agencies.

What's jaw-dropping about this report is that the GAO could find that much duplication of effort in only those three agencies. Considering the entire government spends about $80 billion a year on IT, $321.25 million over six years is almost a rounding error. And only a small number of the programs in these departments—two at DHS, four at DOD, and six at HHS—were found to duplicate other programs within those agencies in some way.

That's not to say $321.25 million isn't a lot of money—it would buy one and a third F-35s, after all. But there are bigger sources of waste in government IT spending than duplication of requirements.

Booking perps and fixing teeth

The Defense Department has the largest overall IT budget of any federal department—its entire IT investment for 2013 is estimated at $31.4 billion. Of the nearly 3000 IT "investments" under the DOD's purview, the GAO found two areas with duplication of effort and just over $30 million during the six-year period—in health care tracking and dental management. The DOD's CIO had already identified those systems as redundant, and all the services have consolidated down to one of the health systems. The Navy is the last to be consolidated into a single dental system—largely because it has dentists on ships, and updating software afloat requires waiting for the ship to be available for maintenance.

Meanwhile, the military services are in the midst of major efforts to consolidate much of their IT. In its 2014 budget request, DOD identified nearly $34 billion in savings over five years, and a good chunk of that total is based on moving more heavily to shared infrastructure provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency.

The DHS, which had an IT budget in 2013 of $5.7 billion, had but one pair of duplicative programs in GAO's audit—an investment of $30 million in booking systems: the Customs and Border Patrol's E3 program and Immigration and Customs Enforcement's ICE-EAGLE. According to the GAO report, DHS officials said that the two booking systems share a common back-end database but have different front ends for "mission specific workflow processes."

HHS, which had an IT budget in 2013 of $7.4 billion, was the biggest redundancy offender of the three. The department had four enterprise information security efforts totaling $256 million over the six years and two Medicare coverage determination projects with combined spending of $2 million. The security projects—three at smaller agencies within HHS (Medicare/Medicaid, Indian Health Services, and Health Resources and Services Administration), and a fourth, much larger enterprise-wide effort—had by the time of the audit been partially consolidated already, though some functions had remained separate.

Can't tell the players without a dashboard

Together, the DOD, DHS, and HHS account for more than half of the federal government's overall IT spending, according to data from the government's IT Dashboard. The dashboard—and the PortfolioStat reviews that are conducted by the federal CIO and the Office of Management and Budget with each agency CIO annually—have been effective tools in applying pressure on agencies to kill floundering IT programs. In its review of duplicate IT programs in 2010, the GAO cited improvements in the dashboard as a source of improved management of agency IT projects.

Though the IT Dashboard no longer sports the names and photos of the department-level CIOs themselves alongside their report cards (like IT baseball cards)—as they did under former US Government CIO Vivek Kundra—IT programs are one of the most transparent parts of government agencies' operations as a result of the data.

GAO's study also missed an even bigger problem—despite a push toward shared services and the cloud, there's a huge duplication of IT investment across agencies. For example, while DHS has taken point on cyber-security for the civilian side of the government, there's no central, standardized government solution for security.

But If the GAO had done this analysis 10 years ago, the results would have induced even greater rage. So thanks for the good news, GAO.

Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat